It can be interesting to see what different references say about different things. Wikipedia’s plot summary of this cartoon is a terse sentence. IMDb has both a summary and a synopsis, and the summary is flatly wrong in one particular; it claims the parrot belongs to the escaped killer, which we have no reason to believe it does. And its synopsis and that of a Disney wiki I use for this column are both essentially full scripts, including pretty much all the action beats and everything the parrot says. I chose to rewatch the cartoon a second time to be sure, but so far as I can tell, every detail is accurate. Though they disagree as to whether one of the gags involves a chicken or a turkey; it’s a whole cooked bird in the refrigerator, either way.

It is a dark and stormy night. Someone is moving, by the look of things, and the parrot in a cage in the back of the truck falls off when they hit a rut. The parrot sees Mickey’s house and goes to seek refuge there. Mickey and Pluto are peacefully listening to a radio drama about a chipmunk and a butterfly, which is interrupted by a news flash—Machine Gun Butch has escaped from prison in a gunfight, and he “might be in your neighbourhood.” So when they hear the parrot barging around, they naturally assume the parrot to be the killer.

Man, these old Disney cartoons are really some prime arguments for gun safety, huh? For reasons, I once again did the good old “search ‘Disney cartoons’ on YouTube and write about the first one that comes up,” and while I did other things, other cartoons played. This was far from the only one that involved unwanted gunshots. In fact, it’s far from the only one where Pluto could’ve gotten shot, so wrap your brain around that, I guess. More recent versions of the cartoon have digitally replaced Mickey’s gun with a broom, but that doesn’t really resolve a lot of what we explicitly see happen?

Also, I don’t know a lot about parrots, but they’re really not like this, are they? I mean, I can’t speak to most of what happens, but cartoon parrots are . . . always equipped with just the right words. Like, let’s not enter Iago into our calculations here; Iago is a Sentient Cartoon Animal. This parrot probably has the intelligence of Pluto but the capability of speech, and he has the right words for any situation. Whereas it’s my understanding that it’s genuinely hard to teach parrots to say things and that they don’t generally have too huge a vocabulary.

Disney did several cartoons where characters thought they were dealing with escaped villains of some sort—there’s a Donald one I’ve written about involving a gorilla. Unlike that one, the killer plot isn’t resolved here. What happened to the killer? Who knows? Who cares? Mickey fired many, many blasts out of a shotgun at a parrot, which . . . is the point?

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